Can Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman Raise "Hellboy 3"?

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Okay, if we’re at the stage in the superhero trend where studios are even mulling over a Hawkman movie, can we maybe bring back Hellboy, one of the evil-fighters who helped jump-start the craze, first?

The two films based on comic book creator Mike Mignola’s sardonic, supernatural-battling hellspawn with the sawed-off horns and stone fist of Doom performed admirably on the big screen, both critically and commercially, buoyed by the visionary direction of monster-loving Guillermo del Toro and the subtly shaded performance of leading man Ron Perlman. But somehow in the current superhero box office gold rush, Hellboy’s slipped back into the shadows.

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PopcornBiz put the question directly to del Toro and Perlman themselves: Will there ever be a “Hellboy 3?”

“I don't know,” sighs del Toro, who’s ramping up production on his next epic, the monsters vs. giant robots flick “Pacific Rim” after spending many years planning a film he won’t ultimately helm: “The Hobbit.” “I wish I could answer that, because we wanted to finish the story, but there is no screenplay yet. And we're all getting older!”

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Del Toro says that if there’s ever some forward momentum on a new Hellboy film, he won’t be interested in merely producing a follow-up or rebooting the franchise with new stars. “For me, my Hellboy is Ron in any fashion. I'm not interested in Hellboy if it's not Ron and myself.”

Perlman, too, seems stymied about his future in the red skin. “I don't know whether or not there's a future for 'Hellboy,’” he admits, but he’s holding out hope. “I would really like another shot at it, because Guillermo kind of set it up to be a trilogy, and a lot of the things that we're done in 1 and 2 would've been answered in 3 and in a very kind of theatrical, sort of larger than life, epic manner. So it would kind of be a great shame if we never got a chance to see the resolve.”

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“I kind of know where Guillermo was going to take him – not specifically, but in broad strokes and it's mind-blowing,” adds Perlman. “It would be a shame for the people who invested in the first two to not get a chance to see that because there's an oracle. Hellboy has a destiny that's non-negotiable and that needs to have been played out, and that was only going to get played out in the last of the films.”